Huawei MediaPad T1 Tablet

I recently bought a Huawei MediaPad T1 8″ tablet (for a real bargain, thanks to Hot SA Deals). I’m not much of an Android fan, and really hate how manufacturers push their own user interface (usually degrading the experience further), but I must say I’m rather impressed with this device. Although it has Huawei’s “UI Emotion” interface, and few custom system apps, it really is pretty good. This device is also known as the “Huawei Honor T1”.

Because of the special I bought it on, mine came with a bunch of bloatware that I wanted to get off – and it wasn’t (immediately) root’able. Both of these problems were fairly easy to solve thanks to this forum post. The process is straight forward (assuming you have a “S8-701u” device) :

NOTE: This will wipe your device and all data + settings… so make sure you backup anything you want to keep!

Extract the zip file, and copy the “dload” folder (buried in some other folders, that will be extracted) to an SD card, then insert it in to the tablet

Power off the tablet, then hold down the “volume down” button and turn it on – release all buttons when the Huawei logo start screen shows

The firmware should start installing and will take a while – you should see a progress bar on the screen . You’ll be prompted to remove the SD card when it’s complete (the device should reboot automatically, and may show the Huawei logo screen for a while during startup)

Once the tablet boots, use the language selector at the top of setup wizard screen to select the desired language (assuming you don’t want Russian)

To root it, head over to TowelRoot.com, click the lambda (image) and choose to open with “Browser” (not Chrome), then run the “.apk” once it’s downloaded

Click the “make it ra1n” button in the app and it should do the rest

Download “Super SU” from the Google Play store (and a “root checker” if need be)

That should be it – worked for me! 🙂

Bonus: my device came with two saved wireless access points (“Arbalest” and “Darknet2”) which seem to belong to the reseller and partner that put all the bloatware on my device… getting the passwords to these access points (prior to changing the firmware) was just a matter of running the pre-installed “Backup” app and saving to SD card, then grabbing the config file from the .zip backup on my PC 😉 Now to find out where those access points are located…